Expect the first R05 product, 1B-CPR to be released in late summer.
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Data Products
CloudSat data products are made available in HDF-EOS format and are created with HDF-EOS 2.5 based on HDF 4.1r2. Later versions of the HDF and HDF-EOS libraries should be able to manipulate the files as long as they are in the HDF 4 series. Files delivered through the online ordering system are compressed (.zip). The file naming convention is as follows:
YYYYDDDHHMMSS = Year, Julian day, hour, minute, second of the first data contained in the file (UTC)
NNNNN = Granule number
CS = Literal "CS" indicating the CloudSat mission
2B-TAU = Product name
GRANULE = Indicates the data subset ("GRANULE" if the data are not subset)
S_RVV = Version string including the processing iteration ("P", "P1", "P2", etc.) and release ("R04", "R05", etc.). For example: P_R04.
EVV = Epoch number
.hdf = HDF-EOS file suffix
Organization of fields and attributes in the HDF-EOS files
The HDF-EOS files are organized into heirarchical groups. The file contains a swath, which for the CloudSat mission, has the same name as the product. The swath contains three groups: geolocation, data, and swath metadata. The fields listed on the following pages are organized into the geolocation and data groups. If there are any product-specific metadata fields then a swath metadata group will be shown as well.
The attributes shown for each field are also stored in the swath metadata group. They are stored in the format [field name].[attribute name]. For example, Radar_reflectivity.factor contains the scale factor for the 2B-GEOPROF radar reflectivity field.